My reviews of country music romantic drama Crazy Heart and Iraqi war film The Hurt Locker are now up at SBS Films - the latter published as part of a pair of dissenting views.Crazy Heart extract:
"Unlike Robert Altman’s Nashville, which satirised country music mercilessly (or at least its more commercial variant), Jeff Bridges' Cooper clearly loves and understands the form and the milieu it thrives in. Whether performed in smoky bars or sprawling outdoor concerts, the music is presented at its best – soulful and melodic, with lyrics that tolerate no nonsense...If you’re going to make a movie set in a specific musical sub-culture, you’d better get its details right. Crazy Heart does that and more. "
The Hurt Locker extract:
"We gain a vivid feel for what life is like on the streets for the ordinary soldier, but get no sense of why some Iraqis are trying to kill them. The Iraqi people are treated almost contemptibly by the filmmakers. With the sole exception of a young boy befriended by one of the soldiers, they don’t exist as rounded human beings with their own thoughts, desires and fears. They’re simply the 'other'."
1 comments:
I think the film was trying to say that unlike other wars, the enemy of this war don't have distinctive clothing to differentiate between soldiers and civilians. The Iraqi civilians are not the ones attacking the soldiers and planting the bombs. They would have no idea how to make a bomb and detonate it by a mobile phone. The enemy are actual Al Qaeda operatives, insurgents from Saddam's previous military and even clandestine military operatives from Iran, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. They dress as normal civilians and blend and live with the Iraqi civilians. They even plant bombs in residential areas knowing that it will probably kills their fellow Muslims more than actual allied soldiers. They don't care as long as they make a point and put fear in the soldiers. This is what makes things difficult for the soldiers. There are many accounts from soldiers who claim it is nearly impossible to differentiate between actual civilians and insurgents. Kathryn Bigelow did a fine job in capturing this and, for once, I actually didn't mind the mobile camera. It worked for me. Avatar made me much more sick.
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